GCOS-8 is a proprietary operating system that provides the required basic functionalities for a family of large, powerful mainframes designed and manufactured by and for BULL. Although this operating system has many widely recognized advantages for developing data processing applications, it has, because of its application history, a rather restricted set of commands for other types of applications such as word processing, scientific computing and non-numeric programming.
On the other hand, the UNIX operating system is more flexible and offers a user a higher degree of ease of operation. It has a larger set of commands by which a user can specify the desired objectives more quickly and in a more straightforward manner. In addition, many higher education facilities have been offering access to UNIX-based systems for the past decade such that a much larger proportion of recently graduated software/computer engineers are already familiar with UNIX. Thus, an operating system translator tool that enables a user who is capable in the use of UNIX to also readily skillfully use the less widely known, but important, GCOS-8 system is highly desirable.
The main problem in designing such a tool is that there are fundamental differences between the design philosophies of these two operating systems; i.e., they were devised with different goals and assumptions in mind. Whereas GCOS-8 is directed toward hosting database systems and other data processing applications, the UNIX operating system was designed to be process oriented. The "look and feel" of these two systems have little in common, and many of the UNIX capabilities are not present in GCOS-8. Thus, development of a general interface that can completely map these two systems to each other is a difficult task.
A software tool, U2G (trademark of Bull Worldwide Information Systems, hereinafter U2G), which incorporates the present invention, is an operating system translator that not only acts as a front-end to the GCOS-8 system, but also enhances the capabilities of the GCOS-8 environment by incorporating a number of additional capabilities that UNIX provides.
Previous attempts to design UNIX to GCOS-8 interfaces were mostly confined to translating a collection of the majority of basic commands that are common to both operating systems. With this approach, only a limited set of inter-operating system capabilities could be provided, and the more sophisticated concepts, such as piping, were not achieved. Again, these shortcomings of the prior art were, for the most pan, a by-product of the fundamental differences in the design philosophies of the two systems.